Hello America,
My name is Tony Whitcomb and I am the Founder and CEO of Expotera.
I have created Expotera, as well as this Blog, to let the good, honest and hardworking Citizens of this Country know that the Revolution has now begun.
Power To The People!!

A 2006 study estimated that around 600,000 Iraqis had been killed by the Iraq War.

Whatever the numbers, it is clear that a huge number of Iraqis did not survive Bush.

Further, Margaret Griffis uses the US military's own data to show that 4,486 American troops have died in the Iraq War.

Those soldiers did not survive Bush either.

While the Bush administration's greatest killing spree was in Iraq, people from other countries also died as a result of his policies.

Before the Iraq War, the Bush administration began a war in Afghanistan, a war that still rages today.

As a result, many Afghans did not survive Bush.

And the deaths that can be attributed to Bush policies did not simply occur in war zones.

While the Bush administration's torture program at Guantanamo was often discussed, it was rarely mentioned that at least 100 detainees died from US torture techniques.

These detainees did not survive Bush.

And just like many people throughout the world did not survive Bush, many others have not survived or will not survive Barack Obama.

It is known that President Obama has a secretive kill list. Those on this list will not survive Obama.

The drone program directed by Obama shows virtually no concern for civilian casualties.

Obama's drones bomb funerals and rescuers. Thus, many funeral goers and rescuers will not survive Obama.

In Yemen, the administration used cluster bombs, which many countries have agreed never to use, in a strike that killed 35 women and children.

Those women and children did not survive Obama.

The Obama administration has also redefined the word "militant", such that any adult male killed by a US bomb is assumed to be a "militant."

These supposed "militants" will not survive Obama.

Obama has presided over bombings in six countries: Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

The victims of those bombings will not survive Obama.

Furthermore, Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan, resulting in increased US casualties. Many Americans and Afghans will not survive Obama.

Obama's policies, like Bush's, kill through more than simply war.

For example, while the 2010 Haitian earthquake led to a moratorium on deportations to Haiti, the Obama administration resumed deporting Haitians in August of 2011.

At this point, the earthquake-ravaged country faced a cholera epidemic.

The situation was even worse in the crowded prisons and camps where deportees were sent.

Vincent Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights wrote at the time that "as the U.S. government knows, deportations to Haiti amount to a death sentence for deportees."

It appears some Haitians may not survive Obama.

Obama administration policies may soon also cost lives by decreasing access to medicine in the developing world.

It was recently revealed that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an international trade agreement currently being negotiated by the Obama administration, would substantially expand the power of pharmaceutical patent monopolies.

This would create artificial scarcity, driving up medical costs, particularly in the developing world.

Peter Maybarduk of Public Citizen wrote that with these provisions "the Obama administration has again increased demands on developing countries to trade away access to medicines."

Judit Rius Sanjuan of Doctors Without Borders' Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines explained that "Policies that restrict competition thwart our ability to improve the lives of millions with affordable, lifesaving treatments."

Fundamentally, the Trans-Pacific Partnership threatens to deny people in the developing world access to lifesaving medication.

If it passes with the current intellectual property provisions, sick people will probably die for a policy that inflates pharmaceutical industry profits.

These patients will not survive Obama.

While this post has focused on the Obama and Bush administrations, it should be understood that deadly policies are by no means unique to these two presidents.

Under Andrew Jackson, thousands of Native Americans died on the Trail of Tears.

Under Bill Clinton, UNICEF estimates that sanctions on Iraq killed around 500,000 children.

LBJ, Kennedy, and Nixon waged an unjustifiable war in Vietnam.

Reagan financed the murderous Contras in Nicaragua.

Woodrow Wilson sent the country into the bloody conflict of World War I, and jailed those who opposed that war.

Throughout US history, presidents and their policies have left gruesome trails of bodies.

Governments across the globe have bailed out these banks to the tune of trillions of dollars.

They have massively subsidized these giant, privately-owned financial institutions, and they stand ready to rescue them again if and when necessary.

The report on bankers’ pay was released only days after Hawaii’s governor announced that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had bought Lanai, the sixth-largest Hawaiian island, for between $500 and $600 million.

The island’s 3,000 residents will be as dependent on Ellison’s good will as were the vassals of the Middle Ages to their lord.

Ellison, the third-richest individual in the United States, is notorious both for his extravagance and his petty avarice.

In 2008, he won a $3 million tax refund from the city of Woodside, California after a court ruled that his house, a reproduction of a Japanese emperor’s estate that cost $200 million to build, was worth only $100 million on the current market.

The court declared that nobody besides Ellison could afford to live in the house, which gave it “limited market appeal,” and on that basis lowered the Oracle executive’s property taxes.

The taxes that Ellison and his fellow California billionaires avoid paying have contributed to the state’s $15 billion budget deficit, which is now being tackled through cuts in vital social programs that keep millions from destitution.

California Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, and the Democraticcontrolled state legislature reached an agreement last week on a minimum of $8 billion in spending cuts.

State welfare benefits are to be slashed in half and $1 billion is to be cut from the state’s Medicaid program, $402 million from state workers’ wages, and $240 million from child care.

Ellison, whose net worth is $36.5 billion, could write a check to cover the amount of these cuts … four times over. Then there are the other 99 billionaires in the state.

Another example of the use to which the super-rich are putting their vast fortunes has been captured in a soon-to-be-released documentary, The Queen of Versailles.

The film recounts the efforts of the billionaire founder of Westgate Resorts (a time-share company) and his ex-model wife to build the largest house in the United States.

At 90,000 square feet, the Orlando, Florida mansion includes ten kitchens and a bowling alley.

The palatial Florida home is named Versailles in honor of the palace of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. That the royal couple had their heads cut off in the French revolution seems lost on the builders of the new Versailles.

A charming detail revealed in the film about the lifestyle of the new Versailles: the family dogs were never housebroken because a small army of servants was always on hand to clean up after them.

Aristocracy, from the Greek root, means “rule by the best.”

However, the financial oligarchy, whose selfish interests determine the policies of the planet’s governments, encompasses the most ignorant and depraved sections of modern society.

“Scum separates by floating upward,” said Marx, writing about the speculators and fraudsters of his time.

“The finance aristocracy,” he added, “in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society.”

The decades preceding the Wall Street crash of 2008 saw a dramatic enrichment of this social element and the refashioning of politics to suit its needs.

The financial oligarchy exercises monopolistic influence over political life, and the police state mechanisms built up since 2001 have been put in place largely to protect its wealth.

The Obama administration itself is one expression of this process.

In 2008, Barack Obama received more money from the finance industry than any other candidate in US history.

After his election, he proceeded to pack his cabinet with former Wall Street executives.

Once in office, Obama made trillions available to the banks and shielded those responsible for the 2008 crash from criminal investigation or prosecution.

The concentration of this great wealth in the hands of a financial aristocracy comes at the direct expense of the rest of society.

One in two people in the United States is either poor or near-poor, and median household wealth fell by 39 percent between 2007 and 2010.

Millions struggle to make ends meet, and the increase in the ranks of those living in outright destitution is staggering.

The proportion of the population living in “extreme poverty” has grown by 50 percent since 2000, from 4.5 percent to 6.7 percent. To be designated extremely poor an individual has to make less than $5,851 and a family of four less than $11,509.

As Mark Twain once wrote, “There never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.”

Every year, trillions are squandered on the yachts, mansions and country clubs of the rich and the micro-economy they create around themselves.

Putting this wealth to rational use would go a considerable way toward eradicating unemployment, poverty and preventable disease.

Ending the anarchy and exploitation at the heart of the capitalist system, which find a particularly noxious expression in the concentration of obscene levels of wealth at the very top, would enable mankind to mobilize and develop the productive forces, including science and technology, to vastly raise the material and cultural level of human society and eliminate inequality.

And yet the universal cry in official politics is that “there is no money” to fund social programs or pay decent wages, and that workers, including the poorest and most vulnerable, must “tighten their belts.”

Such is the character of all historically bankrupt ruling classes.

The issue is not just their personal wealth, but, more fundamentally, their stranglehold over the productive forces of society.

The giant corporations and financial institutions must be taken out of private hands and run democratically in order to rebuild the society the super-rich have ravaged.

Outside of socialist revolution there is no way to curb the political and economic power of the new aristocracy that plunders society for its personal enrichment.

Because everyone in the room knew that Obama wasn’t actually angry about the AIG bonuses, and never intended to do anything about it.

No one there was angry about the bonuses, and everyone knew nothing would happen to AIG executives.

The House would pass bills, which would die in the Senate.

The only people angry were Americans at large, who could not believe that their government worked for Wall Street.

So the joke was funny, ironic, cool. But the moment wasn’t right for it, because this was a serious time for outrage – so Obama quickly reverted to form, and the teleprompter took over.

Pundits didn’t reflect on this “joke”. No one really noted it.

It was very much like George Bush’s comment to reporters that was only later highlighted by Michael Moore, when Bush was on a golf course and perfunctorily said “we must find these terrorist killers….” and then turned to swing a golf club. ”Now watch this drive.”

Obama had risen to that level of duplicity, not a lie in the conventional sense of saying something that wasn’t true, but an entirely constructed false persona.

He had polished the tools of the Presidency – the utter banality of PR, the constipated talking points, the routine abuse of power and taken them to a new level with a self-aware sense of irony about his own narcissistic dishonesty.

His challenge was so outrageous – I dare you to call me on what a liar I am as I joke about how much I am lying to you right now that he turned an obnoxious bluff into art.

Obama had shown this breathtaking tendency to con people as they knew they were being conned before, the most public time during the campaign being his cynical answer when he was asked about his promise to renegotiate NAFTA.

He had said, when fighting for union votes with Clinton, “I will make sure we renegotiate (NAFTA).” Even as he said this, it turns out that campaign advisor Austan Goolsbee had gone to Canada to assure them this was a lie (sure enough, Obama’s trade policies are identical to Bush’s, or worse).

And once the election ended, and Obama was asked about his broken promise by a reporter, he gave the following answer.

“This is fun for the press to try to stir up whatever quotes were generated during the course of the campaign,” President Obama said during his Transition in early December, when a reporter asked him about criticisms he and now-Secretary of State Clinton had made about each other’s foreign policy views.

“They’re your quotes, sir,” said the reporter, Peter Baker of the New York Times.

This is cynicism as art. It’s literally a Presidential candidate running on hope and change saying that campaign promises are a joke and a ruse.

His comments on AIG were similarly dishonest.

When Barack Obama spoke about the AIG money, he gave a well-constructed speech in which he discussed how his administration would do everything legally possible to block the payment of those bonuses.

Of course, those bonuses had been paid out days before he made the statement, so the idea that he’d “block” the bonuses was already something of deception.

His promises to do everything legal to claw back the money were also misleading – Obama didn’t get the money back, and never intended to.

In fact, the administration had weeks earlier asked Chris Dodd to insert a provision into law ensuring the AIG bonuses would be paid – and then blamed Dodd for the fiasco.

Politicians play hardball all the time. They lie on a regular basis, it’s one of the tricks of the trade.

But Obama’s politics, and his career, are built on an exquisitely and brilliantly constructed narrative of integrity and progress.

He is the outsider become the insider, the multi-racial meritocrat whose black and white heritage came together into the ultimate conciliator and political leader.

His is the story of America, that of a brilliant Harvard Law school educated striver with roots in community organizing, who became a powerful orator, and then America’s first black President.

Progressive in spirit, cautious in temperament, he first and foremost understands the challenges facing the nation, the powerful injustice of slavery’s heritage, even though he ultimately finds solace in his belief in America, in American institutions, and in the ultimate goodness of the American way of life.

But there is another narrative, a real narrative about Barack Obama and his administration.

Obama is the ultimate cynic, a dishonest, highly reactionary social and corporate ladder climbing con artist.

Obama is the guy who calls a female reporter “sweety”, who plays poker with the guys, and who thinks that his senior advisor’s decision to cash out after making a “modest” salary of $172,000 at the White House is just natural.

He’s the guy who used the rationale that he’s a father of two girls as to why he doesn’t want young women to have access to Plan B.

He was in favor of gay marriage in 1996, flip flopped for political reasons, and then pretended to change his mind as a matter of conscience.

He runs on populism with a worse record than George W. Bush on income inequality.

His narcissism, and the post-modern ironic sense of self-awareness of how his narrative is put together and tended, is his defining character trait.

It’s not just that he’s a liar.

Lyndon Johnson was a liar, but LBJ lied us into a war in Vietnam as well as a war on poverty.

FDR lied all the time, for good and ill.

Obama’s entire edifice is based on lying almost entirely to help sustain his image, with almost no interest in sound policy-making.

Obama understands the threat of climate change, but like the exceptional con artist he is, what happens to others he does not know, or what happens in the future, is irrelevant to him.

He understands banking, and war, and women’s issues, and corruption and Citizens United.

Like a great con artist, he has studied his mark, the American voter, and specifically the Democratic voter, and he understands which buttons to push.

Many criticize Obama, with the idea that he doesn’t understand, and if only he understood, he would change his mind.

This is part of his false narrative of hope and change.

But Obama reads Paul Krugman – he studied the left intensely and spent years as a community organizer.

He understands his opposition, those crying out for justice against the powerful, and finds them laughable, finds in them weakness at best, a punchline at worst.

He reads his left-wing opponents so he can absorb the talking points, and rebut them.

Some think that Obama can be appealed to around the better angels of nature, that he’s naturally with “the left” but must be gently praised.

But again, this is more of the false hope and change narrative.

Obama understands Saul Alinsky. He gets left-wing ideas. But he hates the left, with the passion of any bully towards his victims.

To him, they are chumps, weak, pathetic, losers. They are such pathetic losers, in fact, that they will believe anything he tells them.

And Obama has no better nature, he is what he’s done in office, someone who murders children with drone strikes and then jokes about it to his rich friends.

Yves wrote about this narrative a few weeks ago, when she pointed out his career in the Illinois state Senate was based on working for billionaire developers to destroy poor neighborhoods.

Few really gets who he is, at his core, and almost no one is willing to publicly point it out.

There are some who went to law school with him, who saw his enormous grasping social climbing tendencies, his eager corporate good old boy persona, his narcissistic calculations.

But they are drowned out by the institutional left-wing voices, the fanboy reporters, the sycophantic labor leaders, the slavishly worshipful foundations, and the voters who cannot hear any alternative to the hope and change they know and love.

The only mainstream narrative challenging hope and change is the stupid right-wing storyline that he’s a Kenyan Muslim socialist.

That’s just racist idiocy.

But there are those on the right who understand Obama’s narcissism, and they may just make that their electoral narrative.

Think about this problem in a slightly different way. It’s been three years.

Why hasn’t been there a great iconic impersonator of Barack Obama, like Tina Fey and Sarah Palin or Will Ferrell (or James Adomian) and George W. Bush?

A comic impersonator reveals something about the core of an individual.

The people imitating Obama seem to think that he’s far more left-wing and principled beneath the surface, that if he let out who he really was, how really angry he is at the Republicans, that’s the parody they hit. It falls flat, because it’s not true to who he is.

The truth is that he’s a narcissistic sociopath dressed up as a cool corporate brand.

The real Obama parody is an Obama who wears an Air Force One fleece over an Obama t-shirt, who says to a reporter “Now hang on, let me finish, speaking slowly and avoiding your question, which is, by the way excellent.”

He’s President, and if you’re upset with him, don’t worry, look at that beautiful photo of Obama smiling and pointing.

This alternative narrative is a hard truth to hear, because it carries with it an implicit rejection of American exceptionalism.

Yes, American institutions are no better, and in many ways are more malignant, than those of many other countries.

Yes, our political leaders, our press, our military leadership, operate in service to sociopathic aims.

Yes, our freedoms are often an illusion, unless you fit a very narrow criteria.

Yes, our banks are run to rob us, yes, our CIA spies on us, and yes, our government is fundamentally anti-democratic.

Yes, our President is a con artist, and yes, nearly every reporter who writes about him participates in this set of lies, because of careerism, social financial reasons, or a simple lack of competence or imagination.

But, the idea that the king is always good, which is where the hope and change narrative draws its deep strength, is something we do not have to accept.

We as people can break this spell, and speak to our own dignity, as citizens.

We can learn our own power, if in no other manner than in saying at the voting booth and in public, “I do not accept your lies, and though you might take it by force, I will not grant you my consent willingly.”

We can choose not to address our political officials by their titles.

We can work to organize ourselves, and our lives, with those of us who understand that power is something that must be taken, with money, organization, but most of all, with moral courage.

It is not something that politicians have except through our consent, consent we have been giving for decades, to a rotten political class.

This is what they truly fear.

This is why they spend tens of billions on propaganda, on advertising, on symbols and personalities and celebrity.

This is why they hide the workings of our government and banks and institutions of power in the language of boring bureaucrat-ese.

This is ultimately why they are weak.

Because in order for them to do their work quietly, we must go about our day, and believe either the hope and change narrative, or the Kenyan socialist narrative, scoffing at the opposing “team” who thinks what we do not.

Instead, we can choose an alternative narrative, that power and consent come from us, come from the choices that we make, as people, and as citizens.

And we will no longer believe that Barack Obama, that cool, brilliant, self-aware con artist is anything but what he has revealed himself to be.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

His muffled shriekings are getting louder as the myths, deceptions and delusions we’ve been living on evaporate one by one in the face of reality.

Can you feel that sickening thrill as we poise atop this Sisyphean peak we call capitalism, right before the inevitable, nauseating plunge back down into reality?

Can you smell the stench from the soon-to-fail Rio plus 20 meeting as we con ourselves into believing we can snatch a bit more time at the peak if only we could steal yet more of our children’s children’s children’s birthright?

Ah, but we – plutocrats and people alike -- all beg, can’t we keep this damned Uncle locked up for just a little more time.

Maybe until this election is over. Or until we’ve extracted a little more money from a fossil-fueled economy based on greed and exploitation. Or until … oh, I don’t know … until we’ve bled the last iota of money from the 99%? Or at least until … I get mine?

Can’t we pretend for just one more generation that capitalism pure, unconstrained capitalism, the kind Reagan promised us would bring morning to America isn’t instead bringing mourning to America, and to the world?

Can’t we just pretend, for one more generation, that the whole infinite growth on a finite world thing isn’t just a giant, tragic Ponzi Scheme designed to sell out the future?

Can’t we pass this problem onto them?

Can’t we use buzz words and sound bites to drown out the lunatic? Words like socialist or redistribution or – most dreaded of all – communism.

Can’t we keep pretending that capitalism is the necessary handmaiden of Democracy, the only path to prosperity, our only source of happiness?

No. We can’t. Because deep down inside, in places we don’t like to visit, we know the Mad Uncle is right. What we’re doing now isn’t making us all rich. It’s impoverishing us.

We are liquidating these essential sources of wealth as if they were so much junk offered for pennies on the dollar at a desperate garage sale.

Our current version of capitalism is good at generating more currency, not greater wealth. And we forget that currency is merely a surrogate for things of real value, with no tangible value in and of itself.

And even the currency isn’t being distributed equally. It’s being siphoned off by the richest and most powerful in a spiral of inequity.

It isn't making us happy, it's enslaving us to a life spent pursuing more and more stuff we don’t need for reasons we don’t understand.

It isn’t making us free, it’s creating a tyranny of the corporations and plutocrats.

They weaken government in the name of freedom, only to turn us into indentured servants to a system that's designed to take from the poor and middle class and give to the uber rich, even as it liquidates Earth’s treasures.

But the real tragedy isn’t our own alienation or our economic and spiritual impoverishment.

It is the diminished legacy we leave the rest of humanity and indeed, the rest of the biosphere.

It’s our willingness to consume the future in an orgy of gluttony, drowning out the Mad Uncle’s protests with the noise of our own slurping, chewing, smacking, munching, crunching as we inhale our children’s birthright.

Hyperbole?

Not really. Every living system is in decline, and the rate is accelerating.

In the case of climate change we are at the threshold of igniting feedbacks that will usher in an inevitable and catastrophic set of changes that will make life difficult in some areas and impossible in others.

It’s time to admit that the Mad Uncle is right. Pure, unconstrained capitalism is the problem, not the solution.

What, then, are we to do?

There are alternatives. We could tie currency to sustainable eco-systems.

Instead of a gold standard we could have a green standard. Thus, destruction of a nation’s stock of natural capital would devalue its currency, and make it poorer.

We could adopt systems of production and ownership such as Co-ops that emphasized cooperation, equitable sharing of revenue and stewardship of our natural resources.

It’s not pie-in-the sky, to consider this. Cooperatives already produce more than $1 trillion in assets, enough to make them equivalent to the 10th largest economy in the world.

We could insist that trade agreements contain real, enforceable requirements for equitable treatment of labor and serious environmental protections, so that globalization ceased being a race to the bottom for humans and the planet.

Yes, these ideas are unrealistic, naïve, politically impossible and all the other labels that will surely be affixed to them and other ideas like them.

But it is worth remembering, that the only thing more unrealistic than junking our current bastardized system of economics is supposing we can continue to liquidate the Earth without consequence.

That’s what the Mad Uncle is telling us. We continue to ignore him at our peril.

John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise, an eco-thriller and Book One of a Trilogy centered on global warming. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News and other major newspapers.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Much of the propaganda that inundates the world’s population is designed to justify animosities and conflicts, whether religious, racial or political.

But there is a larger truth that also must be understood – that we are all in this together, as Winslow Myers notes.

By Winslow MyersConsortium NewsJune 22, 2012

The single most powerful idea that needs to be seeded into world culture as rapidly as possible is that we are one interdependent whole on this planet.

Difficult as the implications may be for us to grasp, it will have only a salutary effect upon world politics, economics, cultural diversity, and religious practice.

Going further, it could be asserted that the internalization in the human mind and heart of this idea is the way evolution itself will manifest itself at this unfolding moment of history.

For relief from such headache-inducing abstractions, I often walk a path that takes me along a tidal river to a midden, a cliff-high mound of oyster shells left from the summer gatherings of indigenous Americans over millennia.

The midden slopes to a beach where horseshoe crabs forage along the sandy shallows—a species so resilient that it has sustained itself unchanged for 445 million years.

The process that has allowed horseshoe crabs to flourish for so long has operated instinctually, on “automatic,” in a roller coaster ride up into breathtaking diversity and down into five vertiginous moments of mass extinction, as life-forms jostled for their place in the ecosystem.

Those forms that adapted survived. Those that did not disappeared, leaving only their fossil remains.

Scientists tell us we are into a sixth dizzying plunge as thousands of species go extinct around us. Natural selection continues to operate at full throttle.

In what has been only an instant of evolutionary time, it became dominant—rather, it has assumed dominance over the system while in reality remaining totally subject to the system’s every law and principle.

The “other” in the twoness of self and other is not only the perceived enemy or opposing viewpoint.

The other is also the natural world that until now we have perceived as an infinite resource subject to our command and exploitation, rather than as the ground of our own sustained vitality. We can be no healthier than it.

If the Chinese continue to operate their coal-fired power plants, the largest single source of carbon emissions in the world, the military-economic competition between China and the United States will become at best irrelevant and at worst a potential disaster.

If the United States continues to use up a third of all global resources, it will matter little whether Iran produces a nuclear weapon or not.

These ecological realities behind our conflicts rarely surface in political campaigns because we are entranced by obsolete competitive metaphors: our politics are not the civil contribution of workable ideas based in interdependency.

Instead they are a Super Bowl contest. Super Bowl twoness is the obsolete thought-paradigm that informs everything we do.

We compete from birth to death. We compare ourselves endlessly with others. We envy those who are wealthier or better looking or apparently happier, and look down upon those less fortunate than ourselves with a distancing pity or contempt.

In a thousand daily ways, we take sides.

Especially in the United States our politics, our legislatures and courts, executive leaders, and mass-media discourse are dominated by polarized allegiance to conservative or progressive opinion.

A Republican president and vice-president administer a torture program of global reach, a program that would subject them to potential criminal trial by Nuremburg standards, but they have enough support among both Republicans and Democrats—given our fear of the terrorist “other”—to receive a pass.

A Democratic president supervises a drone program that violates the sovereignty of other nations and kills innocents at his personal command, also a program that could arguably subject him to potential criminal trial by Nuremburg standards. But he too enjoys enough support to receive a pass.

Instead of the practical imperative of the Golden Rule, that bow toward the truth of interdependence found in all the major world religions, we live by the half-truth of “you’re either with us or against us.”

At the fateful moment in October 1962 when superpower competition, in the form of the Cuban Missile Crisis, brought the planet as close as it has been to thermonuclear annihilation, who was the enemy?

Who was the “other”? Was it not war itself? Was it not ignorance itself? Why is this not equally true in every competitive confrontation from the international to the intimately personal?

We humans emerged from a uni-verse. This is the single context out of which came all our religions, all our cultural and ethnic diversity, our constantly calibrated sense of twoness.

The great next step of the evolutionary process is from twoness to oneness, not as a New Age bromide but as an evolutionary necessity.

This step can only take place in the way individual humans feel and think, as we, we upon whose decisions rests the fate of all life-forms on the planet, mature into willingness to look into how we can contribute to the health of the whole system.

Poet Robert Frost wrote:

Nature within her inmost self divides

To trouble men with having to take sides.

Frost’s couplet distills the depth to which competition is structured into evolution. But we are awakening to the fundamental unity behind our twoness.

As a Peace Corps volunteer once said, “The earth is a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.”

Winslow Myers, author of Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide, serves on the Board of Beyond War (www.beyondwar.org), a non-profit educational foundation whose mission is to explore, model and promote the means for humanity to live without war.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Imagine your ancestor sitting in a cave surrounded by rocks and bones.

One day, doing nothing at all, something in her moves. She touches two objects together a few times in a row, creating a curious, syncopated noise.

It almost sounds like the rain earlier in the day when it started slowing down, dripping into puddles. She wants to hear it again.

Another cave, a few thousand kilometers and years away.

Following his meal, a man sits, entranced, at the edge of a fire pit. He watches the whirling smoke, the dancing flames.

Memories of a wild animal envelop his mind’s eye. Lost in contemplation, he plays with a piece of charred wood and begins to transfer the mental imagery to the wall.

What’s going on here?

The creative process, universal and ubiquitous, remains largely mysterious. In the coming months, this space will be dedicated to a wide-ranging exploration of this process in an effort to foster reflection about, enhance, and cultivate artistic creativity.

To create is simply unavoidable. Each time we open our mouths to speak, we create.

What often comes out is a phrase, imbued with meaning, that has never before been spoken in the history of time. This process happens almost automatically, without work.

How many new configurations of words do we put together in this way every day? Every hour? How many hundreds of millions of original sentences have just been uttered by people around the world in the time it took you to read this paragraph?

While creativity is a defining part of what we do as a species, the environment we are surrounded by — and the environment we choose to surround ourselves with — also determines our creative output.

The woman in the cave had the opportunity to make music because she sat among rocks and bones, and she came to her idea because she had paid attention to the rain drip-drop into puddles.

The man started drawing because the charcoal was next to him, and because dancing gazelles were not far away.

While our nature has not changed much in the last 100,000 years, our environment is undergoing increasingly rapid and dramatic evolution.

As technological change accelerates[1] — as it feeds on itself — the environments of the 21st century that modify our creativity are being wholly revolutionized.

People living in rich societies today are processing more information than ever before. We can now easily max out our mental capacities whenever we like, like a constantly overflowing glass.

Because this usually has the pleasant effect of a sensual or intellectual massage, many of us revel and splash around in the digital waterfall throughout most of the day.

Yet the modern media massage is not without costs.

Due to a phenomenon that scientists call neuroplasticity, our brains are rewiring themselves to adapt to this new mental environment.

Research suggests that engaging with a constant stream of digital information fragments and hyperlinks has significant effects on attention, concentration, memory, and comprehension[2].

How is human creativity impacted by all this?

What is being gained and what is being lost as our creative energies get sucked into hyperconnectedness, as our brains adapt and restructure, as we let ourselves be continually distracted by ever newer-better-faster morsels of information?

One potential concern for artists is the deprioritization of valuable blank time — that fertile mindspace that permits ideas and inspiration to grow and flourish.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

The Lemming Condition tells the story of a community of arctic rodents who blindly follow tradition, culture and peer pressure on a suicidal march over a cliff and into the sea.

Alan Arkin’s fable is of course fiction, based on a myth perpetuated by a popular Disney documentary on animal behavior.

Creatures in nature generally intuit the path to survival and no species eagerly commits mass suicide or self-destruction – no species that is with the possible exception of the human species.

It occurred to me after the spectacle of the recent election in Wisconsin, where common folks, working people with their livelihoods at stake, signed the death warrant for Wisconsin labor by rejecting a recall of their notorious anti-labor governor.

Despite all the money poured into the state from the nation’s wealthiest individuals and corporate entities, no one in Wisconsin could have been unaware of the issues at stake: the end of collective bargaining and an open attack on the last bastion of unionism in the public sector.

I listened to the rationalizations of progressive and pro-labor spokespersons, that the vote did not affirm the rabid policies of their governor but rather represented an objection to the process.

Based on exit polls, they argued that voters did not believe the recall process should be used for anything less than corruption or malfeasance of office.

Frankly, I know something about human nature.

Based on that knowledge, I have drawn the conclusion that Wisconsin voters lied to the pollsters just as they were likely lying to themselves.

With real-world consequences at stake, Wisconsin workers, forming the vast majority of the electorate, stepped in line and walked over a cliff into the sea.

They voluntarily yielded their government to corporate rule. They voted to end organized labor in their state.

To their fellow workers in the public sector, the teachers, nurses, firefighters and police, their message was clear: Go to hell!

Until the results in Wisconsin, I had great hope that the people of America would finally awaken. The candidates taking office in the last election did not run on anti-labor austerity platforms.

Their secret agenda was not revealed until they took office and few were more obvious than Governor Scott Walker. He lied to the electorate but the voters did not feel that was sufficient grounds for recall.

Now I am anything but hopeful.

With eyes wide open we are forming a line, beckoning others to follow, as we march over a cliff into the sea.

We sign petitions demanding austerity, knowing full well that our friends and family members will suffer the consequences: Homelessness, joblessness, paltry wages, hunger and denied medical care.

Public schools and public health clinics will fall on even harder times with overcrowded classrooms and inadequate supplies.

Students in the working class (the middle class will soon be reserved for management) will no longer aspire to higher education. The cost of college will be beyond their means.

Even college graduates and highly skilled workers will be unable to match the low wages and benefits of foreign competitors.

They will eventually fold, joining a burgeoning number of working poor, counting pennies and pleading for help. Unable to pay their debts, homes will be lost and futures discarded.

Old people, facing severe cutbacks in social security and Medicare, will attempt to re-enter the workforce, competing with their children and grandchildren for low-wage jobs.

Police and fire departments will find it harder to respond to anything but the most dire of emergencies.

Denied access to contraception and abortion, more and more women will give birth to unwanted children, many of whom will be condemned to unhappy lives in poverty and need.

Left to exercise unbridled greed, the stock market will run wild until the next curtain falls and this time the crash will reverberate in places no one but the elite can escape.

When we pick up the pieces, massive international corporations will own everything but the bill.

Workers and government officials alike will exist at the whim of their corporate masters.

On and on, it is a grim vision on the social-economic front but it is nothing compared to what awaits us environmentally.

Clearly, a society that cannot afford the fundamentals of health care, education and public safety, has no interest in protecting the air, the water and the ground beneath our feet.

We seem to believe we can vote global climate change out of existence.

Here’s the news: The planet doesn’t care what you think or what party you belong to or whom you vote for on Election Day or whom you listen to on the radio.

The planet is growing warmer whether you believe it or not. The planet is growing warmer because we refuse to stop pumping toxic fumes into the air.

Glaciers are in retreat worldwide, melting into the sea. Oceanic temperatures are rising along with sea levels. Ocean currents are altered, spawning radical storms and radically altered weather patterns. Shorelines are retreating and island nations are under siege, some fighting for their survival.

In keeping with global trade policies, we have transferred virtually all industry to those nations that not only offer cheap labor under inhumane conditions but also lack minimal restrictions on air and water pollution.

Several years back China supplanted America as the leading producer of greenhouse gasses. That economic giant gets an estimated 70 percent of its energy from the world’s dirtiest fuel: coal.

According to a 2007 World Health Organization report, of an estimated two million deaths caused by polluted air each year, 656,000 were Chinese citizens. Another 95,000 die from polluted drinking water.

In both cases, the numbers are surely rising but the Lemmings march on and the western world’s appetite for technological gadgets is never satiated.

Never fear: What goes on in China stays in China. Not so.

As we might have learned from the Fukushima disaster, air and water are globally connected. The toxic waste from Japan’s near nuclear meltdown (a crisis still unfolding) is just reaching American shores. The radiated plumes reached us long ago with unknown consequences.

One would think that all talk of reviving our nuclear industry would be silenced. Think again. Just like the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, all parties concerned consider it a public relations problem that is soon overcome.

Give it a few months and keep the applications coming. Issue a press release about how deeply concerned you are.

Deepwater drilling continues at an accelerated rate and we have plans for more nuclear plants (this time they assure us they are really, really safe), more coal mines, more fracturing for natural gas buried deep in the earth and more tar sand oil imported from Canada.

All carry a heavy price to our environment and the collective health of the planet.

It seems the only restraint we have in energy is that concerning safe and renewable sources: solar, wind and geothermal.

Conservation through mass transit and fuel efficiency is also on indefinite hold.

We continue to pretend that it is not exactly the kind of investment we need to put our people back to work and position ourselves to lead the global economy.

We must continue to subsidize dirty fuel, peel back restrictions, and cut back on everything else.

We cannot afford clean energy. We can only afford to press on with our mindless march to oblivion.

Get in line, fellow lemmings; the cliff is due west and the view before the fall is breathtaking!

Jack Random is the author of Ghost Dance Insurrection and The Jazzman Chronicles, Volumes I and II. The Chronicles have been published by Dissident Voice and others.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

There’s economic reform, and then there’s economic transformation. How entrepreneurs, activists, and theorists are laying the groundwork for a very different economy.

By Gar AlperovitzYes MagazineJune 14, 2012

Just beneath the surface of traditional media attention, something vital has been gathering force and is about to explode into public consciousness.

The “New Economy Movement” is a far-ranging coming together of organizations, projects, activists, theorists and ordinary citizens committed to rebuilding the American political-economic system from the ground up.

The broad goal is democratized ownership of the economy for the “99 percent” in an ecologically sustainable and participatory community-building fashion.

The name of the game is practical work in the here and now—and a hands-on process that is also informed by big picture theory and in-depth knowledge.

Thousands of real world projects—from solar-powered businesses to worker-owned cooperatives and state-owned banks—are underway across the country.

Many are self-consciously understood as attempts to develop working prototypes in state and local “laboratories of democracy” that may be applied at regional and national scale when the right political moment occurs.

The movement includes young and old, “Occupy” people, student activists, and what one older participant describes as thousands of “people in their 60s from the '60s” rolling up their sleeves to apply some of the lessons of an earlier movement.

Explosion of Energy

A powerful trend of hands-on activity includes a range of economic models that change both ownership and ecological outcomes.

Co-ops, for instance, are very much on target—especially those which emphasize participation and green concerns.

The Evergreen Cooperatives in a desperately poor, predominantly black neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio are a leading example.

They include a worker-owned solar installation and weatherization co-op; a state-of-the-art, industrial-scale commercial laundry in a LEED-Gold certified building that uses—and therefore has to heat—only around a third of the water of other laundries; and a soon-to-open large scale hydroponic greenhouse capable of producing three million head of lettuce and 300,000 pounds of herbs a year.

Hospitals and universities in the area have agreed to use the co-ops’ services, and several cities—including Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Washington, DC and Amarillo, Texas are now exploring similar efforts.

Other models fit into what author Marjorie Kelly calls the “generative economy”—efforts that inherently nurture the community and respect the natural environment.

Organic Valley is a cooperative dairy producer in based in Wisconsin with more than $700 million in revenue and nearly 1,700 farmer-owners.

Upstream 21 Corporation is a “socially responsible” holding company that purchases and expands sustainable small businesses.

Greyston Bakery is a Yonkers, New York “B-Corporation” (a new type of corporation designed to benefit the public) that was initially founded to provide jobs for neighborhood residents.

Today, Greystone generates around $6.5 million in annual sales.

Recently, the United Steelworkers union broke modern labor movement tradition and entered into a historic agreement with the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center to help build worker-owned cooperatives in the United States along the lines of a new “union-co-op” model.

The movement is also serious about building on earlier models.

More than 130 million Americans, in fact, already belong to one or another form of cooperative—and especially the most widely known form: the credit union.

Similarly, there are some 2,000 municipally owned utilities, a number of which are ecological leaders. Twenty-five percent of American electricity is provided by co-ops and public utilities.

Upwards of 10 million Americans now also work at some 11,000 employee-owned firms (ESOP companies).

More than 200 communities also operate or are establishing community land trusts that take land and housing out of the market and preserve it for the community. And hundreds of “social enterprises” use profits for social or community serving goals.

Beyond these efforts, roughly 4,500 Community Development Corporations and 1.5 million non-profit organizations currently operate in every state in the nation.

The movement is also represented by the “Move Your Money” and “bank transfer day” campaigns, widespread efforts to shift millions of dollars from corporate giants like Bank of America to one or another form of democratic or community-benefiting institution.

Related to this are other “new banking” strategies. Since 2010, 17 states, for instance, have considered legislation to set up public banks along the lines of the long-standing Bank of North Dakota.

Several cities—including Los Angeles and Kansas City— have passed “responsible banking” ordinances that require banks to reveal their impact on the community and/or require city officials to only do business with banks that are responsive to community needs.

Other cities, like San Jose and Portland, are developing efforts to move their money out of Wall Street banks and into other commercial banks, community banks or credit unions.

Politicians and activists in San Francisco have taken this a step further and proposed the creation of a publicly owned municipal bank.

There are also a number of innovative non-public, non-co-op banks—including the New Resource Bank in San Francisco, founded in 2006 “with a vision of bringing new resources to sustainable businesses and ultimately creating more sustainable communities.”

Similarly, One PacificCoast Bank, an Oakland-based certified community development financial institution, grew out of the desire to “create a sustainable, meaningful community development bank and a supporting nonprofit organization.”

And One United Bank—the largest black-owned bank in the country with offices in Los Angeles, Boston and Miami—has financed more than $1 billion in loans, most in low-income neighborhoods.

Ex-JP Morgan managing director John Fullerton has added legitimacy and force to the debate about new directions in finance at the ecologically oriented Capital Institute.

And in several parts of the country, alternative currencies have long been used to help local community building—notably “BerkShares” in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and “Ithaca Hours” in Ithaca, New York.

Active protest efforts are also underway. The Occupy movement, along with many others, has increasingly used direct action in support of new banking directions—and in clear opposition to old.

On April 24, 2012 over 1,000 people protested bank practices at the Wells Fargo shareholder meeting in San Francisco.

Similar actions, some involving physical “occupations” of bank branches, have been occurring in many parts of the country since the Occupy movement started in 2011. Large-scale demonstrations occurred at the Bank of America’s annual shareholder meeting in May 2012.

What to do about large-scale enterprise in a “new economy” is also on the agenda.

A number of advocates, like Boston College professor Charles Derber, contemplate putting worker, consumer, environmental, or community representatives of “stakeholder” groups on corporate boards.

Others point to the Alaska Permanent Fund which invests a significant portion of the state’s mineral revenues and returns dividends to citizens as a matter of right.

Still others, like David Schweickart and Richard Wolff, propose system-wide change that emphasizes one or another form of worker ownership and management.

(In the Schweickart version, smaller firms would be essentially directly managed by workers; large-scale national firms would be nationalized but also managed by workers.)

A broad and fast-growing group seeks to end “corporate personhood,” and still others urge a reinvigoration of anti-trust efforts to reduce corporate power. (Breaking up banks deemed too big to fail is one element of this.)

In March 2012, the Left Forum held in New York also heard many calls for a return to nationalization.

And even among “Small is Beautiful” followers of the late E. F. Schumacher, a number recall this historic build-from-the-bottom-up advocate’s argument that “[w]hen we come to large-scale enterprises, the idea of private ownership becomes an absurdity.”

Schumacher continuously searched for national models that were as supportive of community values as local forms.

Theory and Action

A range of new theorists have also increasingly given intellectual muscle to the movement. Some, like Richard Heinberg, stress the radical implications of ending economic growth.

Former presidential adviser James Gustav Speth calls for restructuring the entire system as the only way to deal with ecological problems in general and growth in particular.

David Korten has offered an agenda for a new economy which stresses small Main Street business and building from the bottom up. (Korten also co-chairs a "New Economy Working Group" with John Cavanagh at the Institute of Policy Studies.)

Juliet Schor has proposed a vision of "Plentitude" oriented in significant part around medium-scale high tech industry.

My own work on a Pluralist Commonwealth emphasizes a community-building system characterized by a mix of democratized forms of ownership ranging from small co-ops all the way up to public/worker-owned firms where large scale cannot be avoided.

Writers like Herman Daly and David Bollier have also helped establish theoretical foundations for fundamental challenges to endless economic growth, on the one hand, and the need to transcend privatized economics in favor of a "commons" understanding, on the other.

The awarding in 2009 of the Nobel Prize to Elinor Ostrom for work on commons-based development underlined recognition at still another level of some of the critical themes of the movement.

Around the country, thinkers are clamoring to meet and discuss new ideas.

The New Economy Institute, led primarily by ecologists and ecological economists, hoped to attract a few hundred participants to a gathering to be held at Bard College in June 2012.

The event sold out almost two months in advance!

An apologetic email went out turning away hundreds who could not be accommodated with the promise of much bigger venue the next year.

And that's just one example. From April to May 2012, the Social Venture Network held its annual gathering in Stevenson, Washington.

The Public Banking Institute gathered in Philadelphia. The National Center for Employee Ownership met in Minneapolis also to record-breaking attendance.

And the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) held a major conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Other events planned for 2012 include the Consumer Cooperative Management Association's meeting in Philadelphia; the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives' gathering in Boston; a Farmer Cooperatives conference organized by the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives; and meetings of the National Community Land Trust Network and the Bioneers.

The American Sustainable Business Council, a network of 100,000 businesses and 300,000 individuals, has been holding ongoing events and activities throughout 2012.

Daunting Challenges

The New Economy Movement is already energetically involved in an extraordinary range of activities, but it faces large-scale, daunting challenges.

The first of these derives from the task it has set for itself nothing less than changing and democratizing the very essence of the American economic system's institutional structure.

Even viewed as a long-range goal, the movement obviously confronts the enormous entrenched power of an American political economic system dominated by very large banking and corporate interests and bolstered by a politics heavily dependent on the financial muscle of elites at the top.

One recent calculation is that 400 individuals at the top now own more wealth than the bottom 160 million.

A second fundamental challenge derives from the increasingly widespread new economy judgment that economic growth must ultimately be reduced, indeed, even possibly ended if the dangers presented by climate change are to be avoided and if resource and other environmental limits are to be responsibly dealt with.

Complicating all this is the fact that most labor unions the core institution of the traditional progressive alliance are committed to growth as absolutely essential as the economy is now organized to maintaining jobs.

History dramatizes the implacable power of the existing institutions until, somehow, that power gives way to the force of social movements.

Most of those in the New Economy movement understand the challenge as both immediate and long-term: how to put an end to the most egregious social and economically destructive practices in the near term; how to lay foundations for a possible transformation in the longer term.

And driving the movement's steady build up, day by day, year by year, is the growing economic and social pain millions of Americans now experience in their own lives and a sense that something fundamental is wrong.

The New Economy Movement speaks to this reality, and just possibly, despite all the obstacles as with the civil rights, feminist, environmental and so many other earlier historic movements it, too, will overcome.

If so, the integrity of its goals and the practicality of its developmental work may allow it to help establish foundations for the next great progressive era of American history.

It is already adding positive vision and practical change to everyday life.

Gar Alperovitz, Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, is a Founding Principal of The Democracy Collaborative, as well as historian, political economist, and writer.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

The movement has gone from hibernation to invisible, but can rebirth still flourish summer and beyond?

By Common Dreams StaffCommon Dreams.orgJune 12, 2012

"Most of the social scientists who are at all like me - unsentimental leftists, think this movement is over," says Harvard University professor Theda Skocp.

Speaking to Reuters about the grassroots 'Occupy' movement that began in Manhattan last fall and sparked nationwide encampments of public spaces and opened a long-ignored dialogue about income inequality and unaddressed Wall Street malfeasance.

The guffaws of OWS activists and organizers can already be heard as the news that a Harvard professor has called the movement null and void.

But even Adbusters, the 'culture-jamming' magazine that help spawn the original Wall Street occupation, says that things have changed dramatically for the movement.

"Our movement is living through a painful rebirth..." began its frontpage essay this week, and then quoted a Zuccoti park regular who declared, "We are facing a nauseating poverty of ideas.”

Bill Dobbs, a member of Occupy New York's press team, challenged Skocpol's view, explaining to Reuters that he compares the OWS struggle to that of America's civil rights movement - long and uphill, with broad goals to radically alter American society.

The first step, he said, has been to re-animate America's long-dormant spirit of social activism.

Adbuster's prescription: flash encampments. But is that enough?

The questions, however unpleasant for some, remain: what now for Occupy?

What now for those who still believe in the causes of the movement, but are perplexed on how best to move it forward?

Sunday, June 10, 2012

By David Michael Green Information Clearing HouseSunday, June 10, 2012

I could tell you that my heart was broken by what happened in Wisconsin this week, but in truth that’s not quite accurate.

I grew into political awareness and maturity in the middle of the 1970s.

For people my age, then, our entire adult lives have been one long witness to the dismantling of that which we grew up taking for granted as a foundation for any further progress that might come.

We lived in the relatively egalitarian country of the New Deal and the Great Society, with its robust middle class and a measure of earnest compassion for the poor.

Today, that seems like a foreign country, if not a remote planet.

Over the course of our adult lives:

We watched in shock and horror as the country turned to a Hollywood washout, who was literally a national joke candidate five years earlier, and made him president, following him down every path of joyful self-destruction and absurd deceit.

Our jaws dropped in the 1990s at the visage of Newt Gingrich, the most overtly petulant and destructive piece of self-loathing to ever occupy a human body, as he was elevated to the highest position in the United States Congress, and pioneered the basest politics and the shattering of our government that remains our inheritance today.

As if that weren’t shameful enough, at the same time Gingrich’s buddy down at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue was destroying the meaning of the Democratic Party, aping the Republican sell-out to corporate thieves and the abandonment of the public interest – especially the poor, the first to be thrown under the bus.

And, despite the fact Bill Clinton deserves to rot in hell for the damage he did in exchange for his personal joyride in the White House, we were nevertheless forced to watch in horror the relentless and destructive lunacy of the president’s impeachment for the high crime of lying about a blow-job.

We had to endure the travesty of Bush versus Gore, one of the most egregious tramplings of democratic practice imaginable, then watch the sickening product of that judicial rape: the swaggering wars based on lies, the torture, the doubling of the national debt, the environmental depredations, the economic melt-down, and the raison-d’etre for it all: the radical shifting of wealth from the 300 million of us to the one-tenth of one percent who own everything in sight.

Perhaps most emotionally devastating of all – Et tu, Brute?

We’ve suffered the betrayal these last years of another Democratic sell-out, a supposedly liberal-if-not-socialist president actually so conservative and so sold-out that he couldn’t even bear to pursue his own personal interest sufficiently to produce a successful presidency, but has rather continued and amplified the worst characteristics of the open sore that was the Bush presidency, even in the midst of crisis opportunities not seen since the 1930s.

So, no, by this time, my heart was not really broken when my former home-state, Wisconsin, voted emphatically to commit suicide this week. But only because there’s so little of that heart left to break.

Shards here and there were crushed and extinguished, to be sure, but I am becoming rapidly beyond caring about the country I live in, a place and a people so determined to get it wrong at every juncture imaginable.

At some point, don’t you just have to stop trying and let the substance-abuser finish the job on their own?

This country is dying, let’s be clear. It may live yet. It may survive for decades in slow decline.

It may find a way in utter crisis to throw off, before it is too late, the fat slimy boa which is squeezing every last cent of value out of it.

Its political class may invent a devastating foreign crisis with massively grim consequences in order to deflect public attention from its manifest failings.

Maybe it will even be some combination of all of the above.

Who knows?

What we can be sure of, however, is that what was once a great and promising idea as much as a nation is now decrepit to the core, and rapidly rotting away, and that these wounds are entirely self-inflicted.

That, for me, is the kicker.

The Soviets didn’t invade and take us over. We didn’t succumb to some raging virus like the Black Plague. A meteor didn’t blast a hole in the middle of North America.

We just killed the goose ourselves, through a toxic mix of greed, laziness and stupidity.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

America likes to think of itself as a land of opportunity, and others view it in much the same light.

But, while we can all think of examples of Americans who rose to the top on their own, what really matters are the statistics: to what extent do an individual’s life chances depend on the income and education of his or her parents?

Nowadays, these numbers show that the American dream is a myth.

There is less equality of opportunity in the United States today than there is in Europe – or, indeed, in any advanced industrial country for which there are data.

This is one of the reasons that America has the highest level of inequality of any of the advanced countries – and its gap with the rest has been widening.

In the “recovery” of 2009-2010, the top 1% of US income earners captured 93% of the income growth.

Other inequality indicators – like wealth, health, and life expectancy – are as bad or even worse.

The clear trend is one of concentration of income and wealth at the top, the hollowing out of the middle, and increasing poverty at the bottom.

It would be one thing if the high incomes of those at the top were the result of greater contributions to society, but the Great Recession showed otherwise: even bankers who had led the global economy, as well as their own firms, to the brink of ruin, received outsize bonuses.

A closer look at those at the top reveals a disproportionate role for rent-seeking: some have obtained their wealth by exercising monopoly power; others are CEOs who have taken advantage of deficiencies in corporate governance to extract for themselves an excessive share of corporate earnings; and still others have used political connections to benefit from government munificence – either excessively high prices for what the government buys (drugs), or excessively low prices for what the government sells (mineral rights).

Likewise, part of the wealth of those in finance comes from exploiting the poor, through predatory lending and abusive credit-card practices.

Those at the top, in such cases, are enriched at the direct expense of those at the bottom.

It might not be so bad if there were even a grain of truth to trickle-down economics – the quaint notion that everyone benefits from enriching those at the top.

But most Americans today are worse off – with lower real (inflation-adjusted) incomes – than they were in 1997, a decade and a half ago.

All of the benefits of growth have gone to the top.

Defenders of America’s inequality argue that the poor and those in the middle shouldn’t complain.

While they may be getting a smaller share of the pie than they did in the past, the pie is growing so much, thanks to the contributions of the rich and superrich, that the size of their slice is actually larger.

The evidence, again, flatly contradicts this.

Indeed, America grew far faster in the decades after World War II, when it was growing together, than it has since 1980, when it began growing apart.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, once one understands the sources of inequality. Rent-seeking distorts the economy.

Market forces, of course, play a role, too, but markets are shaped by politics; and, in America, with its quasi-corrupt system of campaign finance and its revolving doors between government and industry, politics is shaped by money.

For example, a bankruptcy law that privileges derivatives over all else, but does not allow the discharge of student debt, no matter how inadequate the education provided, enriches bankers and impoverishes many at the bottom.

In a country where money trumps democracy, such legislation has become predictably frequent. But growing inequality is not inevitable.

There are market economies that are doing better, both in terms of both GDP growth and rising living standards for most citizens. Some are even reducing inequalities.

America is paying a high price for continuing in the opposite direction. Inequality leads to lower growth and less efficiency.

Lack of opportunity means that its most valuable asset – its people – is not being fully used.

Many at the bottom, or even in the middle, are not living up to their potential, because the rich, needing few public services and worried that a strong government might redistribute income, use their political influence to cut taxes and curtail government spending.

This leads to underinvestment in infrastructure, education, and technology, impeding the engines of growth.

The Great Recession has exacerbated inequality, with cutbacks in basic social expenditures and with high unemployment putting downward pressure on wages.

Moreover, the United Nations Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, investigating the causes of the Great Recession, and the International Monetary Fund have both warned that inequality leads to economic instability.

But, most importantly, America’s inequality is undermining its values and identity.

With inequality reaching such extremes, it is not surprising that its effects are manifest in every public decision, from the conduct of monetary policy to budgetary allocations.

America has become a country not “with justice for all,” but rather with favoritism for the rich and justice for those who can afford it – so evident in the foreclosure crisis, in which the big banks believed that they were too big not only to fail, but also to be held accountable.

America can no longer regard itself as the land of opportunity that it once was.

But it does not have to be this way: it is not too late for the American dream to be restored.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, is a Nobel laureate in economics, and he has pioneered pathbreaking theories in the fields of economic information, taxation, development, trade, and technical change. He is currently a professor at Columbia University, and has taught at Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and Oxford.

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About Me

My name is Tony Whitcomb. I am a Social Entrepreneur, Founder and CEO of Expotera.
I created Expotera and this Blog, to teach Corporate America and our Government, a few basic lessons in Ethics, Honesty, Macro Economics and Social Justice.
Power To The People!!